May 02, 2011

At one point as I was writing my doctoral dissertation on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project I jokingly suggested to my dissertation advisor that I should leave the project unfinished, just like the Arcades Project itself. "Ah, the mimetic fallacy!" he responded. That ended the conversation. His point was clear: just because one imitates something doesn't mean one can reproduce it.

That fallacy seems to be at work in Kenneth Goldsmith's fascinating yet perplexing attempt to rewrite the Arcades Project as an exploration of New York City in the twentieth century instead of Paris in the nineteenth century. He explains,

The idea is to use Benjamin’s identical methodology in order to write a poetic history of New York City in the twentieth century, just as Benjamin did with Paris in the nineteenth. Thus, I have taken each of his original chapter headings (convolutes) and, reading through the entire corpus of literature written about NYC in the twentieth century, I have taken notes and selected what I consider to be the most relevant and interesting parts, sorting them into sheaves identical to Benjamin’s.

I’ve tried to maintain as perfect as possible a mirror of Benjamin’s project.

Goldsmith can't copy it exactly. He has to find substitutes for some of the major figures in Benjamin's work. Baron Haussmann becomes Robert Moses, an inspired choice. Goldsmith substitutes Robert Mapplethorpe for Charles Baudelaire, which makes sense at the level of a poète maudit. However, to my mind Mapplethorpe's work isn't rich or varied enough to carry the conceptual weight Benjamin placed upon Baudelaire. Andy Warhol would have made a better twentieth-century Baudelaire.

Goldsmith also doesn't seem to have a substitute for the Paris arcades, Benjamin's "dialectical fairyland." Benjamin regarded the arcades as the origin of capitalist culture, the "hollow mold out of which the modern was cast." In Goldsmith's admittedly brief account of his own project, I don't see an equivalent central image. He wants to "read through and describe the magnitude and complexity of the New York City in the twentieth century." By comparison, Benjamin's intent was radically reductionist, even as his notes proliferated. He never would have been satisfied with simply representing complexity.

Another problem with rewriting the Arcades Project is defining it. Goldsmith reports he's written 500 pages so far, "approximately half way to the 1000+ pages that constitutes Benjamin’s book." Except that there's no such thing as "Benjamin's book"--never mind the differences between the Harvard English translation and the German edition as volume 5 of Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften. Everyone agrees that the Arcades Project is the collection of roughly 10,000 notes Benjamin took during his reading in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. However, the notes--not all of them quotations, by the way--were never intended to be ends in themselves. Benjamin made a number of attempts to bring his material into publishable form, including the two precises he produced for Theodor Adorno and the Frankfort Institute. There are also notes Benjamin took as he worked on the essays, as well as his correspondence with Adorno and others. In one letter Adorno shot down Benjamin's proposal to publish the Arcades Project as a montage of quotations, which is what Goldsmith intends to create.

I once contemplated rewriting the Arcades Project, but I dismissed the idea as unworkable. Nevertheless, Benjamin's example is an alluring one, and I haven't completely given up on adapting his representational methodology for a project. I wish Goldsmith luck in his endeavor. He's taken on a huge task. The results will certainly be interesting. They just may not be Benjaminian.

March 08, 2011

Last September French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced the establishment of a new museum, the Maison de l’Histoire de France, the country’s first national museum of French history. Recently it was revealed that the museum will be located in Paris’s Marais district in an eighteenth-century neo-classical mansion, the Hôtel de Rohan-Soubise, currently home to the Archives Nationales. The museum is scheduled to open in 2015.

As soon as the French president uttered the words "Maison de l’Histoire de France" the controversy began.

Sarkozy's choice of words describing the museum raised concerns. The museum, he said, would preserve "l'héritage chrétien de la France, tout en défendant la diversité." Throughout his presidency, however, Sarkozy has referred to France's "Islam problem." Recently he delivered a speech against multi-culturalism.

Opposition came from the "identity is just a construct" crowd, as you might imagine. But what was shocking about the controversy was the opposition from France's cultural establishment. Pierre Nora, of l'Académie française, moaned that "aura beaucoup de mal à se remettre de son origine impure et politicienne." The museum was "un projet dangereux" huffed a group of archivists and historians in Le Monde.

Michael Kimmelman thinks Sarkozy will ultimately triumph in the surrounding the museum.

Historians may look back on the brouhaha as playing straight into Mr. Sarkozy’s hands, pleasing far-right constituents who clamor for the restoration of French identity, such as it is, while making opponents look like academic snobs. If the Maison de l’Histoire serves its propaganda role before it opens and the president then claims noblesse oblige and allows the museum to evolve into the scholarly, independent institution its organizers promise, Mr. Sarkozy might even someday be included alongside his predecessors as a cultural patron.

The selection of the neo-classical Hôtel de Rohan-Soubise as the site of the new museum will also help to calm the waters. Walter Benjamin described neo-classicism, "grandeur in repose," which he didn't mean as a complement. Neo-classicism is always horrified by displays of passion.

January 28, 2011

Last week Rick Poynor found himself with some time to kill before he delivered a talk about Surrealism and graphic design. Luckily for him he happened to be in Paris, so he wandered into the arcades. Recalling that the arcades were a favorite space of the Surrealists, Poyner hoped to find a surreal babies postcard in one of the postcard shops in the Passage des Panoramas. He discovered that all of the postcard shops but one had disappeared. (I remember the postcard shops during my trip there in 2009, but I didn't find any surreal babies cards, unfortunately.) However, a bookstore Poyner remembered was still there, the Librairie Paul Vulin. He inquired about the availability of Yves Tanguy and Surrealism, a book he's been seeking for a long time. Then he had an experience that only the Paris arcades could offer:

The bookseller led me out of the shop and along the arcade, past the windows and shelves piled with books, until we came to a second, windowless door, which he unlocked.

I assumed that we were about to enter another fully operational section of the shop, or a reserve collection only opened up when required. The space turned out to be not a normally proportioned room, but a long, narrow passage, itself a kind of mini-arcade, just a few feet wide. Inside this mysterious hidden gallery, invisible from the public thoroughfare outside, loomed an enormous bank of shelves loaded with art books about every conceivable subject; this wall of wonders ran the entire length of the premises. At the far end of the secret bibliographic sanctum, in the bottommost corner, the bookseller located what he had evidently expected to find there all along — copies of two big hardback monographs about Tanguy, including the volume in English that I was after. The price was a bargain and perhaps that is just as well. The little sequence of events that had led to the volume’s discovery was so perfect that I’m not sure pecuniary sense would have prevailed.

Poyner's little moment of irrationality is perfectly understandable. First, the Paris arcades are an entrancing place. They're my favorite public space. The magical quality of the arcades becomes even more potent when combined with book collecting, as Walter Benjamin noted in "Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting":

The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property. The period, the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for the true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magical encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.

A note about the images above: The surreal babies postcard is from an earlier Rick Poyner blog post. I took the photograph of the interior of the arcades. Poyner has some excellent photographs of the arcades in this post.

January 27, 2011

"Crisis averted," declares Mark Athitakis about the latest crisis in the novel. In a recent conference, “The Crisis of American Fiction,” Jay McInerney pointed out that the novel has always adjusted to changing circumstances with something new: the artisanal realism of John Updike to counter the threat from New Journalism, Don DeLillo's co-opting of post-modernist self-referentiality, David Foster Wallace's reconciliation of experimentation with interiority. The latest threat to the novel is the short attention spans of readers distracted by the Internet. Athitakis cites Laura Miller's recent article on tentative efforts to bring the novel into the Internet age.

I also wrote this week on the contemporary 3D film, which is in crisis after only 18 months or so. In a way, both 3D films and novels face the same problems with the same causes. Novelists worry about constructing immersive reading experiences, while filmmakers are stepping back from the immersive experiences offered by 3D technology. Considered together, the challenges facing film and the novel lead to these questions:

Does the problem have to do with the relationship of form to medium? The relationships between the novel and the books as physical object, as well as film and the theater as a physical place, once seemed inextricable. The novel is no longer so tied to the book, while the cinema faces a much graver existential crisis in the age of digitization.

Is the problem phenomenological? Walter Benjamin argued in "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction" that technology changes perception. The way we see the world has a history. Filmmakers and novelists may be struggling to catch up with changes in the way we relate to our environment. Are Merleau-Ponty's writings on the bodily dimension of perception relevant to this question?

Is form the problem? Miller seems to suggest that it is. It's possible to read Jennifer Egan‘s A Visit from the Goon Squad as a kind of elegiac Internet browsing, an updating of Proustian memory for the Internet age. But what about The Social Network? Does that film look at the Internet from the outside, or does it somehow inhabit it? Has the flowering of long-form fictional storytelling on television (Mad Men, The Sopranos) forced movies into becoming ever-more entrancing spectacles? Can different stories alone engage people more deeply, thus solving problem #2 above?

Is distraction the best way to define the problem? Or is it a problem of center and margin? Whatever we are reading, whatever we are watching, there is always some other book more central to a particular topic, another film more meaningful to watch. In this view, the Internet proffers the false lure of the essential.

January 14, 2011

Like everyone else, Walter Benjamin liked to travel to warmer climates during the winter. Ibiza, Spain was a favorite destination. (That's him at left during a 1932 visit to Jean Selz's home on the island.) So if you're traveling to Spain this winter, be sure to stop in Madrid for the Walter Benjamin exhibition. If you're not planning a trip there any time soon, here are a couple of interesting features on Benjamin that appeared in the last two weeks.

Going to Madrid over the next couple of weeks? Already there? The Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid is holding an exhibition of Benjamin's work until February 6, 2011. The "Constellations" exhibition is an multimedia presentation of historical documents, film clips, pictures, audio recordings and animations.

Alexander Gelley, Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, talks about Benjamin’s conception of history and urban culture in the Arcades Project. Gelley argues that Benjamin’s “weak messianism” is best conceived as a form of writing designed to incite a readership by means of image, example, anecdote, citation.

Henry A. Giroux considers the current historical moment in light of the Angel of History from Benjamin's "Thesis on the Philosophy of History." Giroux argues that we're suffering through a more severe catastrophe of history than Benjamin experienced. Social progress has nearly ceased completely:

Social progress has ceded the historical stage to individual actions, values, tastes and personal success, just as any notion of the common and public good that once defined the meaning of progress is rendered as pathological, the vestige of a kind of socialist nightmare that squelches any possibility of individual freedom and responsibility. If progress even in its mythic register was once associated, however flawed, with lifting the populace from the bondage of necessity, suffering and exploitation, today it has been stripped of any residual commitment to the collective good and functions largely as a kind of nostalgic relic of a historical period in American history in which a concept of the social state "was not always a term of opprobrium" or a metaphor for state terrorism.

January 10, 2011

Virginia Tech’s Lumenhaus, which gets around a lot for a house, now resides next to Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois. Lumenhaus is supposed to be a high-tech updating of Mies's classic. As Avinash Rajagopal writes in Metropolis, when the Lumenhaus reopens to the public this spring,

we will be able to see what we have gained [in the sixty years since the Farnsworth house was built]– in technology and sensitivity to the environment – but also perhaps what we have lost. The Farnsworth house is an ethereal glass box, floating above the ground, all but disappearing into its landscape. The Lumenhaus is a decidedly more substantial creature: all shining steel, gray photo-voltaics and colorful lights. The energy efficient house might be doing more to protect the environment, but it is undoubtedly the Farnsworth house that affords a deeper and more satisfying aesthetic appreciation of nature.

This is a keen observation, but technology isn't the only basis of comparison between the two structures. Technology has a history, of course, but so does nature. Walter Benjamin's concept of "historical nature" refers, among other things, to the proposition that nature enters history as something created. For example, Benjamin regarded Jugendstil (a version of Art Nouveau) as part of a reactionary struggle against the onslaught of technology, which Jugendstil strives to "sterilize" by "ornamentalizing" technology with natural forms, thus severing "technologically constituted forms" from their "functional contexts" and turning them into "natural constants." Nature enters history in highly stylized form as a trove of images to be used to negate technology. Similarly, green technology regards nature not as something to be rescued from technology itself. The modernists mourned a banished nature; the green technologists worry about a perishable nature.

Put less abstractly, consider for a moment the large grassy area around the Farnsworth house. Modernist houses in the International Style have a small footprint on a large lot. (Which, by the way, makes them prime targets for demolition.) The large lot is a stage for the nature/technology interaction. Now, however, we regard large lots as wasteful. True sustainability requires density--in other words, a deliberate retreat from nature in order to preserve it. All those photo-voltaics can't obscure the fact that the Lumenhaus will luxuriate in its mentor's green space, two pristine standalone objects united by a strictly controlled nature.

January 04, 2011

The end of the year is a bad time for writing on arts and culture. All those Ten Best lists start to run together after a while. That's why I was looking forward to reading the "Why Criticism Matters" feature in the New York Times Book Review. The book review editors tilted the discussion with setting Alfred Kazin’s "The Function of Criticism Today" (1960) as a touchstone. Each contributor mourned a lost golden age of literary culture, and skipped over pretty much everything that happened since. Only Elif Batuman, in her invocation of Fredric Jameson, acknowledged that any sort of worthwhile criticism was written between 1960 and whenever they started writing.

None of the contributors proposed any kind of radical change in the nature of criticism. For the most part, they affirmed the type of criticism that appears in the New York Times Book Review. These are the salient points of agreement:

The Internet has ruined everyone's attention span and unleashed a mob of opinionated amateurs on the canon. The proper response of critics is to write well. This is the most dubious of the arguments made, as Mark Athitakis points out.

If criticism isn't doing so well right now, it's because literature isn't either. Today's writers produce works that are elitist and apolitical. Criticism serves the interests of "competitive connoisseurship" (Pankaj Mishra's terrific phrase). In other words, literary culture reflects the culture at large.

Critics and creative writers are equals sharing the same basic purpose: to explain the world to the reader. Adam Kirsch is especially good on this point.

Although critics are equals to novelists and poets, a good critic should be modest, even self-effacing. He or she should serve the reader and the text under consideration. Walter Benjamin took this position as well. This is also a good way to think about teaching.

Literary criticism no longer serves as the model for all other kinds of criticism, as Matthew Arnold believed. I disagree with this point.

Literary critics are no longer public intellectuals in the same sense as Alfred Kazin or Lionel Trilling were. I also disagree with this point, although less strongly.

The meaning of a literary work isn't self-evident, so it is the critic's job not simply to evaluate, but also to explain and interpret. For example, Batuman learned from Freud that "certain facts about our lives are only ever articulated in the form of fictional stories — stories whose plots are related only in the most complex and unapparent ways to the essentially nonnarrative concerns they express."

The value of literature is still hard to convey, but it endures even in the age of the Internet.

December 20, 2010

I will be taking a break from blogging for the holidays. I will return January 4, 2011. Next year I will be rolling out a modified design and experiment with some representational forms derived from Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory.

December 17, 2010

Since I started this blog in 2006, I've concluded every year with a review of the year as I saw it as a blogger. I don't do "best of" lists. Rather, I write about those books, buildings, movies, recordings that will stay with me.

This morning, just before I sat down to write the entry for 2010, I had two experiences that seemed to capture how the world has changed this year, and how it will be different in the coming year.

I was playing with Google's Ngram Viewer, launched this morning, when I was called into an emergency meeting. In my day job I manage web development projects for a major publisher. Marketing executives called the meeting to inform me that the project I'd been managing since last February, a massive redesign of every website in the company, was being put on indefinite hold. When I return to the office on December 28th, I will start another project: building apps for mobile devices, starting with the iPad.

That my company was leaving behind, or at least de-emphasizing, the desktop Internet was very significant. The iPad launch was the latest step in a general trend that became more prominent this year. Increasingly powerful mobile devices are placing more complex data sets literally in the hands of individuals. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, these same devices are generating data about how we read, listen, watch, talk, write, walk, drive, run, and fly. All of this data is being transmitting in real time, stored, and processed. Ubiquitous computing, as these technologies are known, are changing how we see the world--and how we shape it.

One of the highlights of the year for me was working with Iker Gil and the MAS Context team. Through them I encountered projects that expanded my understanding of what design can and should do. For example, Belinda Tato and her team at Ecosistema Urbano built an ecoboulevard in a bleak mixed-use development on the outskirts of Madrid. The "eco" part of the project impressed me less than the "boulevard" part. Ecosistema Urbano created an elegant design addressing a complex set of social, technical, and political problems. A smaller-scale yet similarly ingenious projects was featured in the ENERGY issue of MAS Context. Elizabeth Redmond, founder and president of Piezoelectricity, has created the POWERleap, a device that generates electrictity when people walk across it.

The POWERleap (at left, from MAS Context) and Ecosistema Urbano are both products of a way of looking at cities as complex systems made up of interlocking data sets. A single POWERleap unit doesn't generating a meaningful amount of electricity by itself, but they can be dispersed in enough places and linked together to contribute significantly to a power grid. The design philosophy of Ecosistema Urbano defines the city as a complex ecosystem in which no one structure can be separated out from its environmental, social, and technological context.

The ecosystem metaphor reflects a new way of seeing cities. In my fumbling way, I was making this point in my contribution to MAS Context's INFORMATION issue. While researching the essay I was struck by how urban planners and architects have had to rely on imprecise and static data to make design choices. With ubiquitous computing technologies a city bus, a gas meter in a private home, and a middle-schooler texting her friends can become data points contributing to a comprehensive view of a metropolis, or a single city block. Furthermore--and this is the real breakthrough--it's possible for planners and designers to see how their choices alter behavioral patterns.

The implications of this are enormous. For example, in 2010, for the first time, it has become technologically feasible to craft an advertising message for a single person--that's you, dear reader. I work in an eMarketing department, and we're just now coming to terms with this possibility.

Until you get your own private Internet on your mobile device, you can use your iPad to read 500 billion words written since 1800 on Google's Ngram Viewer. You can enter any combination of words and see how often they appear over time. For instance, if you want evidence of post-structuralism's decline, enter "Derrida, Foucault, Lacan" and see how mentions of all three figures have been in steady decline since 1998 or so. I'm dubious about quantitative approaches to criticism, as are others, but one thing is undeniable: they challenge how we see literature. According to Raymond Williams (in his invaluable Keywords) "literature" separated itself from "being literate" in the middle of the 18th century with the rise of professional writers such as Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson. Since then, literature has been tied up with a certain definition of authorship. However, unlike literature professors, machines can read everything available to them. In the data warehouse, literature is just another data subset. An author is no longer a source of meaning. He or she is little more than a keyword for a search. American literature becomes the entirety of imaginative writing produced (and scanned) by Americans. Trust me, the Ngram Viewer technology isn't just being developed to analyze writing; the totality of image and object production will be searchable too, and very soon. Then the cinema will be Hollywood every cellphone video ever shot--a cinema without directors. Architecture will be every building in the world, from dog houses to supertalls--architecture without architects.

Of course, buildings have been erected for millennia without any involvement from a licensed architect, but architecture as a discipline, with a set of rules and a history, has always revolved around a select number of practitioners and a limited number of buildings. The same holds for the cinema. It's one thing to consider Robert A.M. Stern's use of pilasters or Jean-Luc Godard's jump cuts, but it's quite another thing to study the pilaster in every building built in post-World War II America or every discontinuous edit in France since 1964.

My blogging practice, I'm starting to see, consists mainly of monitoring data streams. There's a literature data stream, a film data stream, and an architecture one. Plus, I keep an eye out for anything else that seems interesting. Here's what the streams have told me in 2010:

This year isn't the year of the ebook, but next year might be. LEEDS certification and reality television have become fixtures in the culture, so people aren't as preoccupied with them as they were in the past. The Social Network and Freedom are this year's most important film and novel, respectively. Everyone hates Daniel Libeskind. Herta Müller's Nobel Prize award in 2009 was widely denounced, but she's drawn international attention to German and Middle European literature. Apichatpong Weerasethakul is this year's Cristian Mungiu. Everyone wants an iPad, but not because they want to watch feature-length films on them. If Zsa Zsa Gabor was famous for being famous, Snooki and Kim Kardashian represent a new kind of celebrity type: famous because they shouldn't be famous. Philip Roth has become a national treasure, which is a weird place for him. 3D films and Sarah Palin are still niche products, and current indicators are that they will remain that way, but that could change. The Shanghai World Expo was the most important architectural event in 2010. American independent film is in serious trouble. Jeanne Gang has emerged as a major architect. Francis Ford Coppola's artistic comeback is never going to happen. But the city of Detroit's might.

November 19, 2010

The very smart, and philosophically informed, film critic Richard Brody comes out against the teaching of philosophy in high school. Recalling Plato's recommendation that only the experienced should study philosophy, Brody argues that philosophy will turn kids into cold-eyed technocrats, like Mark Zuckerberg as portrayed in The Social Network.

It’s no surprise, given the nature and power of Zuckerberg’s ideas, that he should (as depicted in the movie) have trouble dealing with people as individuals; but then, he’s the exceptional case, the genius. Whereas lifting ordinary kids outside their ordinary sphere to the plane of philosophical contemplations runs the risk of turning them all, to some degree, into detached ruminators of life, not even spectators but theorists, critics, or—to use the word on which both “The Social Network” and Lena Dunham’s “Tiny Furniture” turn—assholes.

Brody could be on to something. Immediately after ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy I'd like to see Congress pass a law forbidding the study of Nietzsche for anyone under the age of 30. Then again, in his own youth Walter Benjamin was completely besotted by German Romanticism. For him, youth wasn't possible without philosophy, that without it young people were doomed to fall prey to corrosive influences in mass culture. Here is the twenty-two-year-old Benjamin in "The Life of Students" (published 1915):

[T]he German student body does not exist as such. Not because it refuses to join in the latest "modern" movements, but because, as a student body, it constantly drifts in the wake of public opinion; it becomes courted and spoiled by every party and alliance, is flattered by everyone, and submits to all.

Substitute "mass marketers" for "every party and alliance" and you pretty much have the same conditions today.

What Is One-Way Street?

One-Way Street [Einbahnstrasse, 1928] was Walter Benjamin's first effort to break out of the narrow confines of the academy and apply the techniques of literary studies to life as it is currently lived. For Benjamin criticism encompasses the ordinary objects of life, the literary texts of the time, films in current release, and the fleeting concerns of the public sphere. Following Benjamin's lead, this blog is concerned with the political content of the aesthetic and representations of the political in the media. As Benjamin writes in One-Way Street, "He who cannot take sides should keep silent."